the stories of one southern, class-straddling lawyer and her death row clients

Tag Archives: divorce

Neither of my parents, who divorced when I was five, went to college. I was a good student and was determined to go. Rome had two colleges and a junior college, and there were many colleges and universities in the region. Most of my classmates headed to those or to the big state universities. I headed to a small private Baptist college in the mountains, Carson Newman College.

I worked three of my four summers in the Tennessee and North Carolina mountains, two dipping ice cream at a Baptist conference center and another working at a glass shop at the World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tn. I never would have imagined that I would return to those mountains years later as a lawyer.